Purpose

To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Could pay-to-play lanes solve urban gridlock?

For whom the road tolls

http://grist.org/cities/could-pay-to-play-lanes-solve-urban-gridlock/

By Ask Umbra, October 2, 2014

Q.What is greener – the HOV lanes on
our California freeways (which, now, also allow electric vehicles with
only one passenger), or the newer HOT lanes that are open to any vehicle
willing to pay a toll?

Mike A.
Glendale, Ca.

A. Dearest Mike,

This week on The Great Green Battle Royale: HOV vs. HOT! Will the
high-occupancy vehicle lane take the crown, or will high-occupancy
tolling reign supreme?

For those of you who have been riding a Razor scooter to work for the
past few decades, HOV lanes — those earmarked for cars carrying at
least two (sometimes three)
people — grant a free pass past road congestion, encouraging carpooling
and theoretically reducing the total number of cars on the road. They
also create a smooth lane for buses, making the all-important public
transportation option more attractive.
And where electric vehicles are allowed to join the left-lane party,
HOV lanes provide a nice incentive for people to invest in cleaner cars.

HOT lanes are essentially HOV lanes that allow single drivers to jump
in, too, for a price. That price often varies, with access during peak
rush hours costing the most. While this doesn’t do much for the
carpooling cause, HOT drivers free up space in the “regular” lanes,
which reduces carbon-belching idling and inefficient stop-and-go
traffic. Less congestion and faster commutes all around, so everybody
wins.

That’s the idea, anyway. Some experts
argue that speeding up our jammed highways doesn’t work for long,
because of a principle my econ professor would be thrilled to see me use
here: latent demand.
The idea is that some number of people don’t drive when traffic is bad
enough, even though they’d like to. When you start to relieve that
traffic through HOT lanes (or HOV lanes, or widening highways, or
building new roads), those would-be motorists flock to the streets and
bam, congestion again.

The practice also raises some prickly issues about fairness: Wait, so the rich can buy their way out of traffic? It’s true that nobody is forced to pay, but it’s a regressive
toll on those who do: Lower-income drivers would cough up a higher
percentage of their income to enjoy the smooth-sailing HOT lane — that
is, if they could afford to drive in the HOT lane at all.

Ultimately, though, as much fun as it is to imagine a sort of
smackdown between HOV and HOT lanes, I’ve found the match to be rather
anticlimactic, Mike. In the world of traffic reduction strategies, they
are really much more similar than they are different, making the contest
feel as gridlocked as the SoCal freeways at rush hour.

When we’re talking about reducing greenhouse gas emissions from private cars, we have several options:
greener fuels, greater fuel efficiency, and driving less — and the
greatest of these is driving less. Therein lies the problem with both
HOV and HOT lanes: They’re designed to make driving easier. Yes, they
have some environmental bennies, but they don’t do enough to attack our
main climate goal: curbing driving, period.

HOV and HOT lanes are what some urban planners would call“carrots,”
like bike lanes and expansive public transportation: They provide
incentives for people to ditch their cars. Trouble is, these carrots
don’t always work — unless they’re paired with “sticks” that actually
punish driving. Think fewer parking spaces, sky-high parking fees,
more red lights, even a charge to drive into a city center … anything
that makes hopping in your own car more annoying and expensive than a
greener alternative.

Americans tend to object to these tough-love tactics more than our friends across the pond do, but they work.
And when they do, we all get cleaner air, fewer carbon emissions, safer
roads for walking and biking, and the kind of vibrant, bustling
streetscapes you see in Renoir paintings.

It’s difficult to parse whether any of these strategies are better
than any other, Mike. Jacking up parking fees and other anti-driving
moves won’t do much good if we don’t have plenty of car alternatives
available, such as those bike lanes, light rail systems, and HOV lanes
for buses. So it’s best to think of these policies as parts of a larger
mission — and we need them all to pull it off. This attitude might not
be quite as exciting as a battle royale, but I daresay it’s more
effective.
Rush-houredly,
Umbra